Fortress brings nearly 25 years of experience across market cycles. Managers with under 17 years in private credit missed the GFC.
Here's a sobering reality check: a private credit manager with under 17 years of experience missed the Global Financial Crisis entirely.
In healthy markets, returns can look similar across managers. But real differentiation shows up through volatility and down cycles.
Fortress has invested in private credit since 2002: through the GFC, COVID, and the 2023 regional banking crisis. Fortress’s pivot risk framework reflects those lessons: prepare for the next rapid shift in market expectations rather than trying to predict the next crisis.
Watch to learn why cross-cycle experience matters in private credit.
Drew McKnight:
Here's a sobering reality check. If you've been investing in private credit for anything less than 17 years, you missed the global financial crisis entirely. That was a massive learning opportunity that most managers in this space simply don't have. At Fortress, we've been investing in private credit for nearly 25 years, and we've learned something crucial from every major downturn.
During healthy markets, it's harder to differentiate one manager from the next: returns can look similar. But real differentiation in credit is evident when you look at how managers perform through volatility and in down cycles with increased defaults. At Fortress, we've developed what we call our pivot risk framework. Pivot risk is the idea that market expectations and fundamentals can rapidly change from a normal market to a more turbulent or uncertain investing environment. The potential catalysts for a rapid move in expectations are unpredictable. So as a result, we don't try to predict the next crisis; instead, we try to be prepared for the next pivot and hone our playbook for protecting and growing our investors' capital through it.
Experience isn't just about time in markets. We've been investing in private credit since 2002 – through the global financial crisis, the COVID pandemic, and the 2023 regional banking crisis. Investing through those periods has helped develop institutional experience. Each cycle teaches you something different about how stress manifests across sectors and how to position portfolios defensively while still capturing opportunity.
